Wired.com CTO Still Bullish on Amazon S3, Despite Service Failure

CondeNet chief technology officer Rajiv Pant, who oversees the tech behind Wired.com, writes in to say that he’s not too concerned about this morning’s Amazon S3 service failure. Here’s what he has to say:

In our planned architecture, we will still have our own servers and the content on our servers, so there will be a graceful fall-back if Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) or Simple Storage Server (S3) become unavailable.

The main thing is not have all our eggs in one basket, internal or external.

Amazon EC2 and S3 bring huge cost savings to server farms. They should be used to complement our own servers, not replace them entirely. For example, they can be used for extra compute capacity, for seasonal traffic and for traffic surges.

For startups (and even for our own startups), it is a calculated risk to put all eggs in the EC2/S3 basket. Considering the cost savings overall, today’s glitch may have been acceptable for startups that use S3, like Twitter, given the bigger picture. See this article on the million dollars Smugmug has already saved using S3.

Sadly, all hosting providers, even the content delivery networks, have service failures or partial outages. In-house hosting isn’t immune to outages either.

Like our own hosting facility or anyone else’s, Amazon or Akamai can have issues. By some measures, the probability of them being down is lower than most other hosting providers due to the exposure they’d get. They are also better resourced to deal with outages.

Amazon’s edge computing is similar to Akamai in terms of the problem it solves. Amazon has a 99.9% uptime guarantee on it. I remember a few years ago, when Akamai had an issue in the Southeast area (or maybe even beyond) and I was at Cox, their sites and CNN’s were all affected. The incident was even in the news, talking about how Akamai was a point of failure.

That’s why some companies (like Microsoft) use multiple CDNs. Microsoft used to use both Akamai and Speedera before Akamai bought Speedera. Now, I’m sure they have another.